A biomechanical approach to analyse the kinematics and dynamics of the tennis serve

During the game of Tennis, the extreme intensity and severity of the ball racket collision impact involved often lead to various upper limb injuries. Detailed biomechanical models of the human upper arm are needed to study how the impulse force propagates to individual joint or muscle level. The current biomechanical models are limited to 7 -DoF and are incapable of analysing the synchronous motion of the shoulder joint complex. This thesis provides a comprehensive 9-DoF kinematic model to analyse the detail biomechanics of a tennis player's upper limb and an associated mathematical model to solve the joint space. A literature review has been carried out to assess the current understanding on the biomechanical models, recent developments on inverse kinematic methods and tennis related injuries. The 9-DoF model enables detailed analysis of the motion of the upper human limb including the synchronous motion of sub-joints of the shoulder. A successive frame rotation technique at joint level is used with the proposed joint space realisation model. The proposed model involves measures for eliminating redundancy by determining each joint angle, one at a time. The joint space realisation model uses 3-D parameters from 6 different geometric positions. The 9-DoF kinematic model and the associated joint space realisation model have been tested against flat tennis serves provided hy a professional tennis player for validation. The 9-DoF model and the associated joint space realisation model were used to analyse Upper Limb Joint Torque Distribution resulting from the Flat Tennis Serve Impact Force with the aid of a Jocobian matrix